250 Box Challenge
2:37 PM, Saturday April 17th 2021
Thanks and looking forward to your feedback!
This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.
0 users agree
6:41 PM, Saturday April 17th 2021
Congratulations for completing the 250 Box Challenge!
I can see you made some good improvement with the quality of your mark making. Your lines steadily become straighter and more confident looking as you progressed through the challenge. You drew your boxes at a pretty good size and with a variety of orientations and foreshortening. You also start to do a better job of getting your sets of parallel lines to converge more consistently towards their shared vanishing points!
Before we begin I just want to mention that in the future, when you go to scan your homework submissions, it would be better to scan your homework using the "photo" setting instead of the "drawing" setting. The drawing setting tends to up the contrast on an image and can cause you to lose some of the subtlety in your line work.
I noticed that you still struggle a bit with applying your extra line weight. When you go to add weight to a line it is important that you treat the added weight the same way you would a brand new line. That means taking your time to plan and ghost through your mark so that when you go to execute your extra line weight, it is done confidently and so that it blends seamlessly with your original mark. This will allow you to create more subtle and clean looking weight to your lines that reinforces the illusion of solidity in your boxes/forms. Extra line weight should be applied to the silhouette of your boxes. I recommend that you try adding your extra line weight in no more than 1-2 pases so that you can easily identify mistakes in your work. This diagram should help also you better understand how to properly apply your extra line weight.
Something to keep in mind as well, when you are working through Drawabox you should be employing the ghosting method for every mark you make. This includes the hatching that we sometimes use for our boxes.
Finally while your converges do improve overall I think this diagram will help you as well. When you are looking at your sets of lines you want to be focusing only on the lines that share a vanishing point. This does not include lines that share a corner or a plane, only lines that converge towards the same vanishing point. Now when you think of those lines, including those that have not been drawn, you can think about the angles from which they leave the vanishing point. Usually the middle lines have a small angle between them, and this angle will become negligible by the time they reach the box. This can serve as a useful hint.
Congrats again and good luck with lesson 2!
Next Steps:
Continue to lesson 2!
9:49 PM, Saturday April 17th 2021
Thanks for the critique, and yes, those are good point you've brought up. I will work on them for sure! I don't understand the scanning issue? I mean, I understand the problem, but I'm looking at my scanner options and the item type is 'Photo' or 'Document'. I've selected 'Photo' for all these scans. What other settings do I need to be cognisant of? I use an HP OfficeJet 3830.
8:04 PM, Monday April 19th 2021
I am not an expert on scanners. The main issue is that the contrast is set very high which makes the image appear black and white, but will also remove some of the subtlety from your mark making. That subtlety helps TAs and Uncomfortable identify mistakes in your mark making.
If you cannot find a way to lower the contrast, I suggest taking your work outside on a sunny day and photographing it with your phone. Just make sure you aren't casting a shadow over your work. If it is not possible to adjust your settings or document your work another way then continue as are.
11:46 PM, Wednesday July 28th 2021
Hello,
As I'm beginning to scan in my homework for lesson 2, I remembered your message about the high contrast. I found the exposure settings (brightness, contrast, midtone) on my scanner. The default values were all set to '0'. I scanned one image with default settings and then another one with '-25' contrast while leaving brightness and midtone at '0':
Do you think the lower contrast image looks better? Thank you.
The recommendation below is an advertisement. Most of the links here are part of Amazon's affiliate program (unless otherwise stated), which helps support this website. It's also more than that - it's a hand-picked recommendation of something I've used myself. If you're interested, here is a full list.
The Science of Deciding What You Should Draw
Right from when students hit the 50% rule early on in Lesson 0, they ask the same question - "What am I supposed to draw?"
It's not magic. We're made to think that when someone just whips off interesting things to draw, that they're gifted in a way that we are not. The problem isn't that we don't have ideas - it's that the ideas we have are so vague, they feel like nothing at all. In this course, we're going to look at how we can explore, pursue, and develop those fuzzy notions into something more concrete.